This invention relates to cutting tool member with a diamond coating, and a method of producing such tool member by a method of chemical vapor deposition.
In recent years, diamond coated tool member for machining aluminum and aluminum alloys have become available. In such diamond coated member, the substrate base is tungsten carbide (referred to as WC hereinafter) contains primarily WC with one or two other carbides of 4B, 5B or 6B group metals and associated impurities, and the WC powders are sintered using Co or Ni as a binder phase. The diamond coating on such a substrate base is susceptible to separation from the substrate, thus shortening their service life. Therefore, there are many attempts at improving the adhesion strength between the diamond coating and the substrate based cemented carbide.
For example, a Japanese patent application (JPA First Publication No. S63-14869) discloses a method of improving the adhesion strength, by depositing diamond coating on the surface of the substrate based cemented carbide which has been chemically etched to remove Co from the substrate so as to make the particles of WC protrude out about 0.05 to 0.5 .mu.m from the surface of the substrate.
Another patent application (JPA First Publication H1-246361) discloses a method of removing the Co (from a WC substrate base having an as-sintered surface sintered in a vacuum atmosphere or WC base whose surface has been machined off) by subjecting the surface to vacuum heating at temperatures above the liquid phase formation temperature of Co, and further chemical etching treatment is applied to remove the melted Co particles, and depositing diamond on the chemically treated surface.
However, the bonding strength of the diamond coatings to the base obtained by the techniques disclosed above is not sufficient for practical purposes. The present inventors studied the reasons for the adhesion problems, and discovered that, in the diamond coatings produced by the above techniques, there is a concentrated region of Co near the interface between the coating and the substrate. It has been demonstrated in the present invention that the high concentration of Co at the interface between the diamond coating and the WC based semented carbide substrate is responsible for poor adhesion.